Q&A Thursday #105: Moderators?

Question: Is there any chance that you would appoint some of your fellow contributors, or perhaps select posters, to monitor the threads and address flagged comments? Having the ‘flag’ option is kind of pointless unless someone actually removes the posts. — Good_Ol_Boy

Answer: My designers put in a new copy of Disqus and although people could flag posts, they weren’t automatically taken off the page when they hit a certain number of flags. That has been fixed. If a post gets flagged enough, it’ll disappear now.

As to moderators, I’m not necessarily opposed to adding them, but I’ve found over the years that they tend to be a mixed bag. If you take great care in whom you allow to moderate and keep a close eye on them, they tend to do a good job, but they also miss a lot of stuff. If you add in a bunch of moderators, they cover everything, but a few of them will inevitably be overzealous and you end up with problems there as well.

Honestly, I think the flag button is the best way to handle things and if Disqus ever adds in an “ignore” button to go with it, that will be even better.

PS: One nice plus — we do now at least have comment counts on all the threads which is a step up from the old design.